


Queen A Man

by morganya



Category: The Great British Bake Off RPF
Genre: Bad Puns, Baking, Curtain Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 11:05:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16515170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: Mel and Sue make pastry.





	Queen A Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crownedwitheyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownedwitheyes/gifts).



Really, it was all Mel's doing. She'd woken up early without any particular plan, fed the dogs, made the tea and sent Anna off to work with a kiss and a cheeky pat on the bum. Left to her own devices, she was pondering a trip out to Homebase with the dogs when Mel rang her.

"All right, matey," she said into the receiver.

"Kouign-amann," Mel said.

"Who?"

"Kouign-amann," Mel repeated. "It's going to feature on one of the episodes. Comes from Brittany. Looks like someone sat down quite hard on a hot croissant. I'm going to give the recipe a go today, care to join me?"

"You're certainly living the dream on your day off, aren't you?" she said.

As was her wont, Mel breezed on ahead. "Ben's filming today and the girls won't be home until tomorrow morning. I've got the ingredients, should I bring them over to yours or would you like to come over here?"

"The last time I tried to make bread I wound up with an accidental loaf of carbon."

"There'll be no carbon here," Mel assured her. "Swear on my life."

"Should I go over there then?" she said. "Or do you want to come over here? Shall I pick up anything?"

"I'll come over there," Mel said. "I'll bring a few extra kilos of butter with me. We'll need it."

Mel not only brought butter (two packets, one wrapped in a dish towel full of melting ice to keep it cool), she brought two enormous muffin tins, a packet of yeast, clingfilm, a thick cylinder of parchment paper, flour, a ruler, sugar and a huge white and green box of Maldon salt. Sue opened the door and said, "My God, it's a walking pantry."

"This flour isn't half heavy!" Mel said cheerily, as the dogs, alerted to the sounds of activity, rushed around them, barking their heads off. "Hello, dogs?"

To calm Mel's nerves, she shooed the dogs into the front room and took the muffin tins and flour. "So do you actually know what we're doing, or are we running on blind faith?"

"Little bit of both," Mel said. "Bez gave me very specific instructions, but you know how it is with Mary Berry. If she tells you anything after five o'clock, you'd best hope that…"

"She hasn't broken out the tequila slammers yet."

"Exactly." Mel shouldered her ingredients into the kitchen. "Apparently the Bretons really love their butter, because we've got to construct a large paving stone of it to go into the dough. Fantastic stuff."

Once they'd spent ten minutes discussing who was going to do what, the recipe wasn't intimidating so much as fiddly; a baker's gauntlet of mixing and proving and rolling and chilling and folding and cooking. She had doubts about whether between the two of them they could actually produce something edible by the end of the day, but stranger things had happened.

"I'll do the dough if you'll handle the butter," Mel said, as she puddled warm water into one of the spare bowls and then whisked the yeast into it. There were a few slices of butter melting merrily in the microwave. "Where'd you get this mixing bowl? Is it new?"

"Anna picked it up the other day."

"She's got good taste, that lady," Mel said, and handed her the ice-cold packet of butter. The bowl of yeast smelled like a brewery. "You'll have to chunk that up, I'm afraid."

The microwave dinged and Mel set about brushing melted butter into the other spare bowl. Sue stood over the electric mixer, knife in hand, flicking chunks of cold butter directly into the bowl like a demented whittler.

"This is an ambitious project," she told Mel, as she creamed sugar and salt into the cold butter. "You think the bakers will be able to handle it?"

"I'm sure they'll come up with something brilliant," Mel said. She threw the flour and sugar on top of the bubbling yeast and then added salt and cold water with some more butter. She mixed it vigorously until the puddle in the bowl turned into a pale, shaggy dough. "How's the butter?"

She looked into the mixer. The butter and sugar had melded and turned into a thick yellow paste. "Doing well, I think." She ripped off a large square of parchment to scrape the butter onto. "Do you think you'll ever write another book, mate?"

"Do _you_ think you'll ever write another book?"

"I sometimes think about running off to Cornwall and writing a novel over the summer," she said. "Then it seems like about four other things come up."

"It'll happen one day," Mel said. "Care to form with me?"

There wasn't even counter space in the kitchen to accommodate both the dough and the butter, so they used Sue's dining room table. Mel patted the dough into a rectangle while she rolled the air out of the butter. Mel's hands made a soft _thwick-thwick-thwick_ sound while the rolling pin made airy puffs as it moved across the butter, like a call and response.

"This needs to chill, I assume," she said.

"For a bit. First chilling of many," Mel warned.

"Well, we might as well as take the dogs out for a bit," she said. "Prepare ourselves for the onslaught of butter."

Walking the dogs took half an hour, and then they returned to the kitchen.

"There's a trick to this," Mel said as she rolled out the chilled dough. "If we can get it right –"

"It'll be a blooming miracle," she said, standing by with her breezeblock of butter, ready to drop it on Mel's word.

"Rather," Mel said, and gestured at her to drop the butter. She overturned it onto the dough, where it sat looking yellow and caloric.

"And now we just tuck it in," Mel said, bringing up the lower part of the dough to nestle around the butter.

Sue took the top third of the dough and folded it over. She expected the butter to snap like a Twiglet, but it just bent against the pressure. She pressed down to seal it and then Mel rotated the package when she was done.

It seemed fitting for their double act, she thought, watching Mel roll out another rectangle, to operate on a mixture of trust and blind faith, neither one of them quite knowing what they were doing.

"Second chilling," Mel said and put the clingfilm-encased dough into the freezer. "Shall we –"

"Let's go to the office and chill out for a bit, shall we?" she said.

"Good idea. Can we turn the heat up? I'm feeling a bit chilly."

"What a chilling thought," she said and brought Mel into the office. Mel made encouraging noises at her while she talked about the sitcom she wanted to write until it was time to move the dough into the refrigerator, and then she and Mel talked about Paul's ridiculous new car until it was time to sprinkle the dough with sugar and then throw it back into the freezer.

By the time they actually cut the dough into squares, it didn't feel much like dough anymore so much as cold, slightly floury paste. She greased the muffin tins while Mel pressed caster sugar into the squares. They folded the squares into the tin together and then wrapped them in clingfilm.

"I'll never use my refrigerator again after this," she told Mel. "I've been opening and closing fridge doors all day."

"Last go-round," Mel said, and put the tins into the refrigerator. "Shall we?"

They went to the cinema and then to dinner. Then they went on a walk with the dogs through the dark, quiet streets. When they were back at the house, Mel preheated the oven and put the muffin tins in to cook.

"What's the plural of kouign-amann?" she asked.

"Kouignoù-amann," Mel said. "Although these are so small they should really be called kouignettes."

"You've really put your languages degree to good use," she said.

"Top-grade education," Mel agreed. "Shall we put the kettle on?"

It only took ten minutes before the house was filled with the smell of warm sugar and butter. There were sizzling noises coming from the oven.

When she took the kouignettes out of the oven, they were brown and crusty and fragrant. "Shall we?" Mel said.

When she bit into the kouign-amann, it was still a little hot, and she had to suck air through her mouth to keep from burning it. It was worth it for the spread of butter and sugar on her tongue, for her teeth sinking through layers of soft sweet crust, the crunch as she swallowed.

"So, a job well done?" Mel asked, already reaching for a second pastry.

She chewed and swallowed. "Delicious."


End file.
